Listening for the voice or looking for the will of God are trendy topics these days. Much ink has been spilled and many conferences have been produced around the simple question; “What does God want me to do?”. WWJD indeed?

For those of you who are wondering about the phenomenon I am talking about, here is an article that expresses the route most Christians take when attempting to answer the question above.

First, this desire to know and find God’s will1 generally comes about from a right desire to obey God in all facets of life which, therefore, appears to be a mark of one’s spirituality if we tell others that we are “listening to God”. In fact, we have many places in Scripture where we are commanded to listen to the voice of the Lord and not to harden our hearts. In fact, one evangelist used Hebrews 3:7-11 in conjunction with his evangelistic presentation to try to convince people that the feelings they had were really promptings from the Holy Spirit.

Second, the struggle comes in because this “voice of God” is usually rather elusive and the one in search of it is often left without a clear and concise answer to the question they are asking2. Many teachers use Elijah’s experience in the wilderness3 as an example here.

John Piper and Mark Dever have both written excellent articles on this subject, both offering very good outlines and rebuttals. But the most comprehensive work I’ve found has been a doctorial dissertation done by Garry Friesen which subsequently became a book titled, Descision Making and the Will of God.

The bottom line is that workmen approved by God4 know how to rightly divide Scripture, not some vague inner impression that may or may not be God’s voice.

From even a cursory reading of the Old Testament and New Testament we can see that when God spoke, the intended hearers knew beyond a shadow of a doubt both who was speaking and what was being said. It is only because of an intense and misguided5 desire for “religious experiences”6 that we tend, more often than not, to seek the “will of God” outside the definitive Word he left for us.

How we go about learning God’s will for our life (let alone others’ lives) matters very much. It is wrong for us to ask someone to trust our religious experience. It does not matter how real they are/were for us and regardless of how convinced we may be that they are genuinely from God, the fact is that we are not prophets which is what we would end up being if the generally accepted “voice of God” view is accurate.

Mary Baker Eddy, one of the founders of Christian Science movement, based her theology almost exclusively on the belief that people today can and should “listen to the voice of God” as it gave them more revelation than what was found in Scripture. In the most extreme sense7, one can also cite Joseph Smith and Muhammad‘s extra-biblical revelation in the same vein of “hearing from God”.

We should rather stick to the objective facts8 when it comes to what we claim and proclaim as the “Word of God” which, when carefully evaluated, can only be the Scriptures God himself wrote and preserved and it alone is what our faith should be based and built upon.

One final note, religious experiences are wholly bad in themselves but we should never ask someone to rely upon OUR experiences since that would be asking them to place their trust in us rather than God.

At this point I know many will ask: What about the Holy Spirit? This is another area I fear we have not taught very clearly on which I’ll address in another post, but I wanted to address the cancer this whole “voice/will of God” notion is in the Church today. Something I believe produces undue anxiety in too many Christians. Crippling them with a heavy yoke and burden which looks nothing like he light and easy yoke Christ claimed to bring in Matthew 11:30.

Often expressed in the exhortation by many pastors to “listen for the still small voice of God, more on that later, though. [↩]